During GitHub Universe developer conference in San Francisco, the AI programming assistant Copilot was highlighted, which is to be provided with additional advanced functions in December. GitHub’s main goal remains unchanged: To help software developers write code and make software development more secure.
GitHub announced that various functions that are part of GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) will be enhanced by an AI update. CodeQL scanning can now provide AI-generated solutions for detected security issues in pull requests. This feature is compatible with the JavaScript and TypeScript programming languages, which are among the most commonly used languages on GitHub.
In addition, an AI detective function comes into action that can search for passwords. Secrets, such as API keys in code repositories, still pose a significant security risk. To provide better identification capabilities, GitHub has launched the Partner Program for Secret Audits. So far, 180 partners have participated. Regular expressions (regex) can be used to create your own search patterns. To make this complicated process easier, an AI can now be used to generate regular expressions by answering a questionnaire.
Passwords were previously more difficult to discover as they do not normally follow recurring patterns. With the help of a new generation of AI language models (LLMs), it should now be easier to track down such unstructured secrets, according to GitHub. GitHub’s partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft provides access to a wide range of models, making it easier to choose the right tool for each task. This is explained by Michael Hanley, Chief Security Officer and Deputy Head of the Engineering team at GitHub. The AI security features within the Advanced Security program are now available as a preview version. Interested parties can sign up for a waiting list.
Looking at linear developments, India could have more developers than the USA in 2027.
Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role on GitHub. Projects that deal with generative AI are now among the ten most popular open source projects in terms of the number of developers contributing to them. Open source projects supported by companies have the largest number of developers contributing to a project for the first time. In 2023, private repositories grew by 38% and accounted for 80% of activity on GitHub.
A continuing trend is the use of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and cloud-native application development. This can be seen in the popularity of languages such as HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) and Go. In 2023, more than 4.3 million repositories contained Dockerfiles, which can be used to create containers. The programming language Rust recorded the largest growth.
In addition to the annual Octoverse Report, trends on GitHub have also been continuously displayed in the Innovation Graph since September.
